The Dress

When I was a child, I had asked my mother why she didn't have a "real" wedding dress. She replied that she had wanted something that she could also wear when going dancing with my father.

My only knowledge of that dress had been through their black and white wedding photograph. Not until I was older and we packed up to move to another apartment did she actually show it to me. The dress was a deep dark maroon velveteen, floor length gown. Simple lines, no decorations, very light in weight. She told me that she had not worn it very often, Dad's illness had robbed her of any dancing opportunities.

The dress remained packed away, hidden in some box in one of our closets. I grew up, left home and thought little about it. Then, when she was dying from cancer, it surfaced like a ghost haunting the family mansion. "I want to be buried in my wedding dress" she declared a few weeks before she passed away.

Her wish was not to be granted. With very little time to locate it before the scheduled viewing at the funeral parlor and no clue as to its location, I had no desire to ransack her apartment to locate it. Besides, she was so devastated from her illness, I felt that putting a dress like that on her would be a travesty. Instead I chose a simpler garment, the dress forgotten.

At the very end of the two months it took me to clean out her apartment, the dress finally surfaced. I took it out of the box and put it into another, relegating it to a category I dubbed "useless objects, but too many fond memories to toss away". Besides, having seen it all folded up, it looked way to small for me to ever wear.

It wound up hanging in my closet with all my other outfits from lives I no longer lived. Garments that all held memories and thus were too precious to throw away. The only time I actually examined it was when mildew had started invading my clothes closet. I inspected everything carefully but with too many garments, and boxes, and too little time, I was not about to fool around trying on a useless dress. And so again for the next 2 years it hung there.

This coming year I have a formal dance to attend. So I started thinking about what garments I had in my closet that I could alter and wear. Her dress came to mind.

Thinking her dress wouldn't fit me, I came up with ideas for cutting it apart and adding other fabric or lace to it. I was willing to turn it into something else entirely. Heck, it wasn't HER dress anymore ... she's been gone for 16 years!

Then the time came to try it on. To my amazement it fit me. No need to alter it, no need to slash it to pieces. I looked at myself in the mirror. It was a beautiful dress in its simplicity. I didn't look like her in the photo, she was much younger than me and I have a few bulges here and there. But it was ME! It moved gracefully, it draped lovely. One of the jackets I put on fit well with it. I had my outfit.

After I took it off, I examined it closely for the very first time. The seamstress that she was, she had made her own wedding dress! More amazingly, it is over 70 years old and the fabric is as sturdy as the day she had crafted it.

So I will not cut it, I will not slash it, I will not alter it. All I will do is add some trim to it, and shorten it a bit. After all these years, it will truly be mine. A simple, rather strange inheritance. I'll work my magic on it so that it is updated for the 21st century. And I wonder what magic this dress will work on me.

© Leona Seufert

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